Millionaire Robert Durst had countless chances to get away with the murders he committed, but he ended up leaving clues. Or being arrested for petty crimes like stealing a sandwich. The chase game between him and the US Court began exactly 40 years ago, when his wife, Kathie, disappeared on the night of January 31, 1982.
At the time, the case was highlighted in the press because Durst was the heir of a family that grew rich in New York real estate and owned several important buildings, including a portion of the World Trade Center.
He had millions of dollars to spend as he wanted, but at the same time he had many personal problems. When he was seven years old, his mother died after falling off the roof, under unclear circumstances. His father paid him little attention in childhood, and the businessman would end up fighting ugly with his brothers as an adult.
In the 1970s, he met Kathie McCormack, a middle-class young woman. They moved in together after a few dates and were soon married. At 30, Robert did not want to get involved in his father’s business and preferred to open a small natural food store, called All Good Things, next to his wife.
After nine years of union, Kathie suddenly disappeared. On a Thursday, Durst sought out the police and told them that the woman had been missing for a few days. The two had a lakeside house in Westchester, outside New York. The millionaire said he had seen his wife for the last time on Sunday night, when he took her to catch a train to New York.
Kathie took medicine classes in the metropolis, and used to spend the week there, in an apartment of the couple. Durst said that he called his wife on Sunday night and confirmed that she had arrived all right, but that for the next few days she no longer responded to his contacts. The police believed his version and treated the case as a disappearance.
Kathie’s family, on the other hand, had suspicions about Durst and had been lobbying for years to try to understand what happened. Durst didn’t get along with his wife’s relatives, and the marriage was in ruins. Victim of assaults, she even went to the hospital with injuries to her face shortly before disappearing, and had told people close to her that she was afraid of her husband.
In an investigation of their own, her family discovered that Durst was gradually disposing of the woman’s belongings, in a sign that he knew she would never return. They also found a handwritten paper with a list of tasks that could be used to get rid of a body. None of this, however, made the police treat the businessman as a suspect.
The case was widely covered by the press at the time, but was forgotten after a few years. At the same time, Durst’s life lost its way. In the 1990s, he left the family business and broke up with his brother, Douglas, who moved around with heightened security out of fear.
In 2000, New York police decided to reopen the case. Weeks later, Susan Berman, Durst’s longtime friend who helped him deal with the press in the 1980s, was shot in the head in her Los Angeles home. Police received an anonymous letter with her address and the word “corpse” handwritten.
At the time, Durst was also not considered a suspect. But the following month, in January 2001, he was arrested for killing a neighbor in Galveston, Texas. The businessman said he wanted to spend time there to get away from the persecution he was suffering due to the reopening of the case. For that, he gave a false name and pretended to be a woman.
The body of neighbour, Morris Black, was found in pieces, in sacks thrown into a bay. The police arrived in Durst because they noticed, with the remains, a piece of newspaper with the address of the house where the crime was committed. There, there were saws and plastic to cover the floor. And Durst was seen buying these items at a city building supply store. There was even a saw in his car.
Durst was arrested, but only spent one night in jail: he was released on parole after posting $250,000 bail (R$1.4 million at current prices). Months later, he missed the trial and became a fugitive. He toured several states, using a document that belonged to Black, the murdered neighbor. His arrest happened for something trivial: he was arrested for stealing a chicken sandwich from a supermarket, even though he had thousands of dollars in cash in his car.
In 2003, Durst went to trial. With the support of experienced lawyers, he convinced the jury that he accidentally killed Black, in self-defense, in the middle of a fight after a neighbor allegedly broke into his house without permission. So he was cleared of the murder charge. In December 2004, in another trial, he was sentenced to prison for violating parole rules and for trying to hide Black’s body, but was released again in July 2005, still on parole.
Upon being released, he continued to cause problems. In December 2005, Durst attacked a judge who presided over his trial when he found her at a mall in Houston. He was arrested again, but released once and for all in March 2006, when he finished serving his sentence.
Four years later, in 2010, the film “Between Secrets and Lies” was released, based on the story of Kathie’s disappearance. After watching, he approached production director Andrew Jarecki and said he wanted to tell his version of the story. His interviews gave rise to the documentary series “The Jinx”, released in 2015 and currently available on HBO Max.
In conversation, Durst turns out to be a cold man. He calmly tells the camera that he attacked his ex-wife several times and forced her to have an abortion because he didn’t want to have children. He also assumed that he had lied to the police about several facts from the night of the disappearance: he had not called the woman to confirm that she had arrived in town.
At one point during the recordings, he went to the bathroom. With the mic still on, he said to himself, “That’s it. You got caught. What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.” However, there were questions that the speech would have been edited from several of his loose sentences.
Durst was arrested on the same day as the showing of the last chapter of the series, on the charge of killing his friend Susan. This time, he was not entitled to bail. The trial, held in California, began in March 2020, but was suspended because of the pandemic and resumed in May 2021. There were four months of hearings, until the jury found him guilty of murder, under the aggravation that the reason for the The crime was trying to prevent Susan from revealing information about Kathie’s death. The conviction was of life imprisonment, without the right to parole.
In November 2021, another trial in New York held Durst responsible for his wife’s death. The jury found him guilty based on his record and his efforts to try to hide the information. However, the victim’s body, to this day, has not been found.
Now 78, Durst goes on to say he didn’t kill his wife. However, during his trial, he admitted to prosecutors that he would not speak the truth if he had actually killed her. He is serving time in California and faces a number of health problems, including bladder cancer. His lawyers say he is close to death.
Kathie’s family celebrated the conviction, but questioned the delay in court. “Our family and our lawyers have provided witnesses and evidence that Robert Durst killed Kathie, but it took the prosecution nearly 40 years to prosecute him. The more important question is, why did it take so long? We deserve answers,” said James McCormack, brother of victim, after the sentence has been released.
The victim’s relatives suspect that the Dursts bribed local authorities to have the case forgotten. Bob Abrams, the family’s attorney, has called for the opening of an investigation into a $400,000 campaign donation by Douglas Durst to then-New York Governor George Pataki, a Republican who remained in office from 1995 to 2006). The suspicion is that the money may have been a way of influencing the entrepreneur’s case. Spokespersons for Pataki and the Dursts say the allegations are baseless fabrications.
Another question the family is still trying to resolve is what actually happened to Kathie. Despite so many investigations and the conviction over 40 years, it is still not known how she died. Durst seems to like to reveal information piecemeal, and chances are he’ll tell you something else in the final stretch of his life. Or maybe write a note.
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